DaVinci Resolve Studio – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance

Introduction

Over the last three months, NVIDIA has been doing a rolling launch of their new GeForce RTX 30 Series video cards, culminating in the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB which just recently hit the market. While gaming is almost always a major focus during these launches, professional applications like DaVinci Resolve are becoming increasingly important for NVIDIA's GeForce line of cards.

DaVinci Resolve (especially the Studio edition) is known in the industry as having excellent GPU-acceleration support – greatly benefiting from a powerful video card. We are especially interested in how the RTX 3060 Ti in particular will perform as it is in previous articles, NVIDIA's RTX 30 series cards were able to out-pace everything from AMD. The RTX 3060 Ti, however, is the most affordable RTX 30 series card from NVIDIA to date, so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the latest GPUs from AMD.

If you want to see the full specs for the latest GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series and AMD Radeon RX Graphics Cards product pages. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

While specs rarely line up with real-world performance, the biggest thing to note is that the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti is at the bottom end of the product stack from NVIDIA and has the same exact MSRP as the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. So, from a price-to-performance standpoint, that will be the card to beat for NVIDIA.

Note that the current supply is so poor that you will be lucky to find many of these cards for anywhere near the MSRP. However, we typically use the MSRP as a baseline for price in order to rule out fluctuations due to different brands, sales, and scarcity. The actual cost you will likely need to pay for either an AMD or NVIDIA card is likely to be quite a bit different, so keep that in mind as you read this article.

Test Setup

Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of December 1st, 2020

To test each GPU, we will be using the fastest platform currently available for DaVinci Resolve – most notably the AMD Threadripper 3970X. Since Resolve can utilize the CPU heavily in some workloads, this should minimize the impact of the processor and allow each GPU to perform at their fullest potential.

For the testing itself, we will be using the 0.92.1 version of our PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve benchmark. If you wish to run our benchmark yourself, you can download the benchmark and compare your results to thousands of user-submitted results in our PugetBench database.

We will be using the "Extended" preset that includes both 4K, 8K media as well as specific GPU Effects and Fusion tests. Using 8K media with the RTX 3060 Ti (and other GPUs with only 8GB of VRAM) is actually not a good idea due to the "out of GPU memory" errors you would likely encounter, but our benchmark does not load the Resolve UI which means that the VRAM load is much lower; allowing GPUs with just 8GB of VRAM to successfully complete the 8K tests.

Raw Benchmark Results

While we are going to go through our analysis of the testing in the next section, we always like to provide the raw results for those that want to dig into the details. If there is a specific task you tend to perform in your workflow, examining the raw results is going to be much more applicable than our more general analysis.

Overall DaVinci Resolve Performance Analysis

While many reviewers like to solely look at things like temporal noise reduction (often to an unrealistic degree) or OpenFX that heavily utilize the GPU, we first want to start off by looking at the overall performance we saw from our DaVinci Resolve benchmark with each GPU in order to show what most users would likely experience in their day-to-day work.

Looking at the Overall Extended Score, the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti does very well; scoring within a few percent of the more expensive RTX 3070 and previous generation RTX 2080 Ti.

Compared to the AMD GPUs we tested, the RTX 3060 Ti is even more attractive. Not only does it beat the AMD Radeon 5700 XT by a large 30%, but it even manages to best the Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT by over 10%. The 6800 (XT) does have the advantage of having twice the VRAM, although that typically is only a consideration for those working with 6K+ timelines. And at that point, however, most users will likely want to use the RTX 3080 due to how much faster it is compared to the AMD GPUs.

Bear in mind that this looking at the Overall Extended Score which measures the performance in all of our tests – including a number that can be CPU bound. To get a better idea of the maximum performance difference between these cards, we should hone in on the "GPU Effects" portion of our benchmark which looks at tasks like TNR and various GPU-accelerated OpenFX.

GPU Score Analysis

The GPU effects portion of our benchmarks looks at the performance of individual GPU-accelerated effects such as temporal noise reduction, film grain, lens blur, optical flow, face refinement, and more. In our testing, these effects easily show the largest benefit from having a powerful GPU, which means that they should give us the best look at the maximum performance gain you may encounter from each of the GPUs we are testing.

In this test, the RTX 3060 Ti continues to out-perform all of the AMD GPUs we tested. It may be only ~7% faster than the significantly more expensive Radeon 6800 XT, but the RTX 3060 Ti is just shy of 2x faster than the Radeon 5700 XT.

Compared to the higher-end NVIDIA GPUs, the RTX 3060 Ti is of course at the bottom of the stack (as it should be). However, the RTX 3070 is only about 8% faster which is about right considering it has a $100 higher MSRP. The RTX 3080 and 3090 are really where NVIDIA takes off from a performance standpoint, with those cards being 54% and 78% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti respectively.

How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB perform in DaVinci Resolve Studio?

Overall, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a very solid GPU for DaVinci Resolve. At most, the RTX 3060 Ti trails the RTX 3070 by just 8%, but can be as much as 2x faster than the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. This also makes the RTX 3060 Ti faster than any AMD GPU we have tested to date, besting even the Radeon 6800 XT which costs significantly more. This makes it a terrific option for those on a tighter budget.

If you need more performance, the RTX 3080 and 3090 are of course going to be significantly faster than the RTX 3060 Ti, but for just $399, the RTX 3060 Ti holds its own very well. Especially if you do not use many OpenFX or noise reduction, you may opt to use the RTX 3060 Ti over the more powerful (and expensive) cards in order to devote more of your budget to a more powerful CPU, more RAM, or faster storage.

As always, keep in mind that these results are strictly for DaVinci Resolve. If you have performance concerns for other applications in your workflow, we highly recommend checking out our Hardware Articles (you can filter by "Video Card") for the latest information on how a range of applications perform with the latest AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.